2/13/13

Too Cool for Drool

I envy you people who say you have no regrets. That is, I
would envy you if I thought you were being truthful, and not simply living in
denial about all the disgraceful lapses in judgment that blot your permanent
record.

Regret could be considered my primary character trait. My life is a rich
tapestry of bad jokes at funerals, lampshade-clad party gymnastics, and
anger-fueled outbursts of “I don’t need your stinking job!” when clearly I did.
My body itself is a testament to regrettable actions. I’m covered in scars
received not from acts of orphan-saving valor, but from double-dog dares that I
couldn’t catch a Nerf football from the back of a moving moped and similar
adventures. If I did it, it’s likely that I regret it.

But often it’s the actions I didn't take that bring the most regret. And of
course, being a nerve-wracked wallflower type all my life, I usually regret the missed
romantic opportunities – the broads not taken. Sure, there were the inebriated
make-out sessions with mystery meat that I wisely preempted before juniors
were conceived. No regrets there. But then there were those objects of desire I
was simply too pants-wettingly terrified to go near. And that includes my
biggest regret, Delores Dewhurst.

Delores sat behind me in my 6th grade English class. And I found her
especially intimidating in this field of study because she herself was English.
What on earth this royal subject was doing in a South Carolina public school
was a mystery, but even then I knew it was a grave injustice. Her lilting,
British accent, like Mary Poppins on the verge of song, clashed harshly with
the yodels and hog-calling of my other hillbilly contemporaries. She was exotic
and foreign, which in the brutal food chain of middle school, made her a
bottom-feeder.

Aside from her alienating speech patterns, Delores was unnervingly pale – that
near-albino pigment that only the sickliest of rain-soaked Londoners can
achieve. She was thin and gawky in an Ichabod Crane sort of way, with a huge
overbite and stringy, blond hair too thin to cover her jutting, Prince
Charlesian ears. She was covered in freckles – a lone feature that could make
even the sultriest of schoolgirls unacceptable in the unenlightened ‘80s. She
had a fashion sense at least 20 years out of date, wearing girly jumpers and
colored stockings that made her look like one of the kids on “Family Affair.”

Naturally, I was deeply in love with this strange and
wondrous creature. But for the sake of my social standing in the schoolyard, I
couldn’t tell anyone. Admitting that I swooned over this gangly nerd girl would
have reduced my own social standing to that of Myron Lockerman, the thalidomide
kid who threw up on the gym coach.

And so it was that the enchantingly awkward Ms. Dewhurst stayed at arm’s
length, even as I quizzed her in class about her native England. She puzzled me
by claiming to prefer the South Carolina swamps to her home in London. “England
is so duh-tee,” she chimed like Big Ben. I should have seen this as a hopeful
sign. Delores didn’t want to return to England. She wanted to stay here with
me, where I could snuggle on the couch with her, giving her the benefit of my
cultural enrichment by teaching her about Star Trek and Bigfoot.We could have
been very happy.

Instead, I shunned poor Delores in favor of chum-approved girls from the
regional trailer parks and bowling alleys. My Monty Python quotes were lost on
these cultural vacuums, and I was forced to entertain inane blather about their
Van Halen albums and unicorn collections. They were obsessed with hair and
jeans.They made out with acne-covered bubbas at the video arcade and smoked
menthols behind the Putt-Putt. Delores read Jane Austen and Hawthorne. She
wrote romantic poetry with gloriously refined penmanship. The girls I went out
with were keen on tractor pulls. I was a peer-pressured idiot.

The divine Delores Dewhurst vanished after middle school – probably to teach
English in some Montessori academy, leading the children in song to reinforce
their understanding of past-participles. Ultimately, my romantic life turned
out great, but what of poor Delores? Is she still suffering the emotional pains
of having been snubbed by that incredibly charming and attractive American boy?
It’s hard to imagine she wouldn’t be.

Many of you women out there lament your school days, the years of getting teased
and bullied by the other girls for being fat, dorky, or generally skanky to the
point of cootie infection. And though it’s really no consolation, you should
keep in mind that we boys were equally teased and bullied…if we ever let it be
known that we were attracted to the fat, dorky, skanky, cootie-infected likes
of you. We did like you, but we couldn’t admit it to our Cro-Magnon classmates
without inviting wedgies at best. Confessing to a sexual attraction to mountain
goats would have been less traumatizing than telling your friends you thought
the chunky girl with pink eye was kind of nice.

And that’s a shame, because that’s the sort of girl who can talk you out of trying
to catch footballs on the back of a moped.

2 comments:

Thank you for this piece. I'm speaking not only for myself from my own benighted unwanted history of my younger years, but on behalf of my entire fat freckled awkward gawky dorky wallflower sisterhood.

Sigh. I have a similar regret for a certain guy in high school that I was good friends with- I had a violent 2 year long crush on him, but I didn't have the guts to make a move. What kills me when I look back on that situation and his behavior, is that he clearly felt the same way but was also too shy to make a move. Here's what I regret most: if I'd had the courage and wound up in a relationship with him, no matter how brief and high-schooly it may have been, I would have acquired the small measure of self esteem needed to NOT get involved with that asshole my freshman year in college.

Oh well- that's all gone now. I was lucky enough to find Jeff and have a happy ending.

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is an illustrator and opinionated crank living in the bygone century known as South Carolina. His wide variety of neurotic quirks and extreme sensitivity to broad social trends are chronicled as The Symptoms, a continuing blog of sophisticated tantrums. Ashley's work has appeared in many defunct publications and hard-to-sell books. He is considered a complete failure by those envious of his genius. He has a website for some reason: www.ashleyholt.com